1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for scheduling operator actions for a print job to be printed in a print-while-rip mode by a printing system, the printing system comprising a user interface and a controller for scheduling the print job in time, the print job not yet received completely by the printing system and having a plurality of known print job properties and missing information that is essential for an accurate print job duration calculation of the print job, the method comprising the steps of receiving the print job at least partially in a print buffer of the printing system, determining a first part of the print job duration, the first part of the print job duration being guaranteed to be consumed based on the plurality of known print job properties of the print job and based on the at least partially received print job, and establishing a start time of the print job.
2. Description of Background Art
Nowadays, a print job schedule for scheduling print jobs in a printing system shows predicted media usage and output destination status based on the known print job information, like print job properties and print system parameters, like print speed. However, in case of a print job to be printed in a print-while-rip mode part of the print job, some information is unknown. A first part of the print job received in the print buffer in the controller can be used to determine a definite first part of the print job duration based on the plurality of known print job properties and the data block in the buffer. A start time of the print job can be established and scheduled. An operator can be sure that printing can continue the coming first part of the print job duration.
A data block or block of data, sometimes called a physical record, is defined as a sequence of bytes or bits, usually containing some whole number of records, having a maximum length, a block size.
An example of a print-while-rip mode, sometimes equivalently called a rip-while-print mode, is a print job that is first delivered at a raster image processor, which can only rasterize blocks of data of the print job one after each other before the ripped data block is transferred to a print buffer in the controller of the printing system. The rasterizing image processor may be external to the printing system or may be incorporated in the printing system, for example in the controller of the printing system.
Another example of printing in a print-while-rip mode is a streaming print mode. In a streaming print mode, a print job is divided into limited blocks of data and one block after another is transmitted to the controller of the printing system. The controller is only aware of the number of pages of the current block and is not informed about the total number of blocks of the print job to be processed.
A typical streaming print mode is transaction printing. Transaction print jobs are different from ‘publishing’ print jobs in that the controller does not know when the print job will end after it starts. A transactional print job may involve a hundred, a thousand, or a few million prints. Many digital printing system's controllers are designed to ingest the entire job, arrange its resources according to the size of the print job and then begin printing the print job last page first so that what is produced is a ‘book’ with the user seeing the first page first. This ‘publishing’ model obviously does not work for ‘transaction’ printing. Therefore, a controller using a different internal model for print jobs is used for transaction printing.
Since part of a print-while-rip job is unknown to the controller, a planning of future operator actions is nowadays difficult, since the end of the print job is not shown to the operator.